Crazy Little Thing Called Compromise
by glitters and gold
Summary: Living with Katniss was never easy and sometimes they still acted like children, but somehow they were finding a way to make it work. :: Because sometimes the people you love are the ones who annoy you the most. Brief oneshot.


**Note: **I am home sick. I have three English assignments to type up by Friday night. I have also gone post-happy due to my fevered bordish state. I will also be dragging my sniffling shivering self to go see_ Hunger Games_ at midnight, because I must. I _must._ So I give you this as a tribute to Suzanne Collins. No pun intended. Oh, yeah, and Maroon 5, for those of you who don't recognize it.

I will blame anything negative about this on the fever (it's 101, by the way). Have some pity on me and click the stupid review link, will you?

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><p><em>It's not always rainbows and butterflies, it's compromise that moves us along.<em>

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><p>Peeta had been at it for exactly two minutes before the wintery tendrils reached his hands, hands that had been scarred and burned and broken, too many times. It numbed them and cracked the skin along the edges until he was forced to grudgingly cram his fists into threadbare pockets that offered little warmth against the miserable, stinging cold that had settled over the remnants of District 12, and would remain for the next three months of winter.<p>

With a last bang that rattled the white wooden door in its threshold, he sank down to the floor of the snow-littered porch. Amongst the bland white landscape of December, he could almost pretend the scarce leftovers of the ashes coasting over the bitter winds were nothing more than fresh snowflakes, carried down from the feathery grey clouds that blanketed the sky.

It was difficult to finger exactly what brought him to be stuck out there in the first place, without so much as a measly jacket against the thirty degree temperatures. Peeta never knew at which specific moment things went wrong, or how it came to be that his brute strength, virtually his only power over Katniss, began to fail him in the midst of her unjustified anger. All he knew was that she started to snap at him and he started to use her name more than necessary until some metaphysical force at work in the sprawling universe decided that they were going to start screaming at each other. Needless to say, somewhere between asking if she was making coffee and speculating over Annie's due date things had taken an obvious and frightening turn for the worst; a turn which involved much shrieking and irrational measures that could have easily and logically been avoided.

Not that logic had much place inside the Everdeen-Mellark home, as it had appropriately been renamed seeing as he spent every breathing second holed away from reality inside the carefully crafted walls of her house, although it was clearly more lacking on the Everdeen side of things. Regression tactics, the eccentric doctor back from the merciless crew of psychologists in District 13 had said; returning to childlike behaviors, such as extended periods of silence and temper tantrums. Well, Peeta mused to himself, sticking medical names onto something that could be labeled something as plain and pure as immaturity was the job of a doctor.

The surrounding air seemed to grip him with a more biting edge by the second. Suddenly, Peeta remembered the key. With a renewed sense of eagerness his frozen fingertips searched under the frayed brown mat that sat just outside the door. It had once been worded "Welcome!" in sunny yellow letters, before Katniss had scrubbed every last morsel of the paint out and carelessly kicked it outside to match the bareness of everything else in their pathetic, unjust lives. Clumsily, he felt around until his fingers closed around the frigid body of the thin silver key. Bounding up as quickly as he could manage with a metal contraption attached to his lower body, he jammed the key in the lock and twisted forcefully.

Where there should have been an encouraging click there was only a shrill struggling noise as the key failed to allow the door to swing open so Peeta could step gratefully and appetently into the warm interior. Blocking his much anticipated action was the antagonist herself, metal lock clutched firmly between her pointer finger and her thumb.

"You can't be serious!" he groaned, just loud enough for the sound, muffled by the heavy wood of the door, to reach her unwilling ears.

She merely kicked the door in response, a completely insufficient response in Peeta's opinion, but nevertheless it accomplished its goal.

"Oh come _on!" _Peeta insisted, starting up the banging for the second time that day and the third time that week.

"What do you want?" Katniss barked irritably.

"Don't be stupid. You know what I want."

Katniss mused to herself that that statement could be interpreted many different ways. Peeta wanted plenty of things; all things that Katniss did _not _want. "You're right, I do. That's why I'm in here, and you're out there."

"Katniss, please? It's got to be below zero out here!" If there was one thing Peeta could not stand, it was being reduced to begging and pleading with her over something as pointless and unreasonable as this. There were no methods of explanation or understanding when her temper ran away with her, like it had earlier.

"Maybe you should have thought of that before," she argued stiffly.

"Before _what?_" Peeta dropped his hands abruptly and met her cold, dull stare. Katniss crossed her arms over her chest and turned around, sliding down on the opposite side of the door and blocking the entrance.

"Go away."

"Where, exactly, would you like me to go?"

She pictured him throwing his hands up in the air in exasperation, like he always did when he knew she was going to win, despite the fact that her argument didn't even make sense. Which, of course, he was; rather animatedly.

"I don't care!" she shouted, slapping her hand on the door for emphasis.

"We both know _that's _not true," Peeta huffed, crossing his arms to hold in whatever little warmth was left in his body. The sound of him tapping his foot filtered through the door, and Katniss sighed.

Reluctantly, she reached her hand up and twisted the lock without looking. A gust of bitter air hit Katniss in the back as the door slid open slightly, but she was still leaning against the back of it.

"Katniss, please move," Peeta said tightly, through gritted teeth.

She didn't, so Peeta pushed both her and the door open, causing her to slide across the floor. When he slammed the door behind him she was still left in the same position, arms crossed protectively over her chest on the dark panels of wood.

"What," he sighed, "is wrong with you?"

"Nothing is wrong with me!" Katniss insisted, pushing herself off the floor.

He didn't bother to point out the irony. Just about _everything _was wrong with her by this point; just about everything was wrong with the both of them, for that matter. They had adapted to their own form of reality, clinging to what little of themselves they could salvage through the flames that burned though Panem. Neither one of them ever mentioned how they were the ones that started it.

"Then why are you flipping out like this? I just said—"

"I know what you said! I heard you!"

"Then would you please explain," Peeta growled, "why you're acting like this?"

She recognized the shift in his behavior almost instantly. He held his jaw in a tense and rigid clench, and the tendons at the base of his neck that ran down and spanned out across his shoulders pulsed and rippled like they were trying to break out of his very skin. Their arguments usually reached a point like this, when it shifted past irrational anger and into some sort of conflict that had never been resolved. Whatever it was, Katniss wasn't willing to go sifting and sorting through the past, digging up memories that were too painful to bring up again. Fixing yesterday's problems just wasn't worth that.

"That's not it," Katniss shook her head and stared out the window behind Peeta. A small bird flitted around the trees, like it was running from something.

"Then what _is _'it?'"

She tore her eyes off the bird—a sparrow, she thought—and looked into his eyes. His clear blue irises stare back at her; the same blue the skies used to be before the 74th Hunger Games. The same blue she and Prim used to dance and play under.

"Forget it," she muttered, walking past him into the kitchen. He caught her arm.

"Katniss, really?"

She twisted out of his grip. "I'm serious. Just forget it. It's nothing."

"So you're telling me you threw a fit and locked me outside in the middle of winter over _nothing." _It had better not be, because, frankly, that was not okay with him.

Katniss stared stubbornly at the ground.

"Well?" he asked, but softly, this time, placing his hands gently on her shoulders, lifting her chin up to look at him with one hand.

"Peeta, we _can't," _she whispered.

"We can't _what_?"

"We can't be normal!" She finally shouted, stomping her foot and curling her fingers into fists. "We could never be normal, or... or have a family or even a real life!" She plowed on with more force than she'd used in awhile, though he had no intention of stopping her. In a strange sort of way, it was nice to see her take an interest and a care about something. Her entire demeanor was one of a quiet, gentle person lately; a person that she wasn't. One of them was shaking, but she couldn't tell if it was him or her. "Everything I touch gets ruined! Everyone's dead!" It only took a phrase so simple to trigger every emotion she'd held back as the weeks dragged on; a phrase so simple but so chest-achingly true it became impossible to keep the tears inside any longer. "Everyone's _dead," _Katniss repeated in a shocked whisper.

Her knees buckled and Peeta's strong arm slid around her waist. He knew she hated feeling so frail and fragile, but there came times when she was reduced to supporting herself with him. The only reason she would show so much weakness was because it worked both ways. They both had good days and bad days. He pulled her closer and she buried her head in the crook of his neck; a common place for her to be lately.

"Katniss, _I'm _not dead. Your mother isn't dead. Gale isn't dead."

"But they're both gone," she sobbed. "And they won't come back."

"Not me," Peeta reminded her gently. "I'm right here, Katniss. I'll always be right here."

"That's what you said before," she pointed out. "It wasn't true."

"But I made it back to you, didn't I?"

The answer, of course, was yes. It always would be. Their world could never be easy or even manageable; not anymore. It had to be grueling and hard, and sometimes they would have to drag each other out of bed in the morning, kicking and screaming and even crying. But it had to work. They had to make it work, because all though both of them were unstable and only a few nightmares away from falling apart, the most constant thing left in their lives that had been mutilated, abused, and flipped upside down was each other. And about the only thing they could really and truly be sure of anymore was the only other person left behind.

She could only nod, and minutes later they were both seated at the wooden kitchen table that has too many chairs these days. Her hair was still wet from the shower she'd taken during the time he was locked outdoors and it hung in straight sheets that the water added a deeper, slicker tone of black to. She clasped her fingers a bit too tightly around the edges of the blue ceramic mug, swirling the hot chocolate around and watching it settle again.

She mumbled an apology and he brushed it off and murmured another comforting word or two, and they moved on. There were some things about her that just drove him _crazy_ and there were times when everything he did rubbed her the wrong way for no reason at all. Living with Katniss never was easy, and they would always fight fairly often and they still acted like children sometimes, but somehow they were finding a way to make it work.


End file.
